Menu
BLM presents proposed fire break project
Ranchers, farmers and other residents met in Mountain Home last week for their first look at a long-range plan aimed at helping curb the number of wildfires that sweep across the county.
A town hall meeting hosted by the Bureau of Land Management on Feb. 4 sought public input on the proposed Paradigm Fuel Break Project.
The bureau is proposing to develop a network of fuel breaks along approximately 187 miles of routes and roadways situated between Blacks Creek Road and Glenns Ferry -- an area prone to frequent wildfires, said Mike McGee, project manager with the BLM's district office in Boise.
"The purpose of the fuel breaks is to provide firefighters with areas where they can safely implement suppression actions and increase the likelihood of containing wildfires," McGee said. "The fuel breaks will also reduce the risk to life, property and natural resources."
Pending final approval, the pilot project is expected to take up to 10 years to fully evaluate its effectiveness. If successful, it could serve as a model for other public lands across the United States.
Feedback gathered during last week's open house will go into the project's draft environmental assessment -- a requirement outlined in the National Environmental Policy Act. People wanting to include their feedback in the draft document are asked to submit their comments to the BLM by Feb. 24. The draft document is currently available online at www.blm.gov/epl-front-office.
Jay Clark and his daughter, Rhiannon, were among the member of the public that attended last week's gathering. Clark and his father are among a handful of dry land farmers in the local area that don't use irrigation resources to water their crops.
The Mountain Home resident knows firsthand how fast and how destructive wildfires can get. In July 2012, his family lost two of their barns after a range fire swept across their property near Ditto Creek Road.
"It's unbelievable. We have more wildfires than any other place in the country," said Clark as he reviewed one of the fire break maps.
"We're the fire capital of the world," added Josh McGrew, one of the local ranchers that attended last week's meeting.
For others like Eduardo Contreras, a sage grouse conservation specialist with the local Natural Resources Conservation Service, the open house allowed him to address concerns with local wildlife. He was particularly focused on how the fire breaks would affect sage grouse -- a species currently listed as a candidate for federal protection as an endangered species.
Looking over the plan, Contreras was satisfied that the project factored in local sage grouse habitat and how the proposed fire breaks would affect this type of wildlife.
Meanwhile, Pete Humm was focused on another major concern -- the series of high voltage transmission lines that run across this part of the county. The existing power grid was designed 30 years ago and is straining under the public's growing demand for electricity.
"It doesn't take much to screw up the grid," Humm said.
All it would take is one large-scale range fire to take down a number of these lines, triggering a widespread power outage across the western United States, he added.
However, Humm remained optimistic the project would alleviate these concerns.
The six proposals outlined at the public open house were the result of recommendations made in 2011 during a fire symposium that brought together land owners and government agencies. They met to look at better ways to deal with wildfires, especially in Elmore County.
Over the past 30 months, nearly a third of the county burned due to wildfires -- an area larger than some states. A map on display at the public meeting emphasized that this part of the state maintains one of the highest wildfire incident rates in the United States.
No area in the country has been hit as often or as hard by wildfires as the Snake River Plain, according to officials with the BLM office in Boise. Those fires caused significant damage to local habitat and forage land for cattle and wildlife while posing major threats to endangered species and natural resources throughout the area.
The Paradigm Fuel Break Project seeks to "break up the pattern" of range fires that have swept across Elmore County since the 1970s, said Michelle Ryerson, field office manager with the BLM's Four Rivers office. It also includes an effort to reduce the spread of cheat grass and medusae grass -- invasive, non-native plants that have spread across the region.
Maps on display for the public to review last week outlined six plans currently under consideration by the BLM. Each map featured varying levels of coverage.
For example, the Alternative 2 plan outlines the entire project and the nearly 190 miles of fuel breaks. In comparison, the third alternative would draw the major fire break along Mayfield Road.
"We want to use this road because if (a fire) gets over the road, it'll take off from there. There's no where else to effectively stop it," McGee said.
Three other alternatives presented to local residents would take less time and money to complete but would cut back on the level of compartmentalization the BLM would like to include as part of the overall fire break plan, McGee said. However, larger fires could spawn if there are fewer compartmentalized areas included in the final fire break project.
The last alternative would focus solely on high human traffic areas, including the I-84 corridor and sections of Highway 20. However, that alternative includes the "least amount of protection," McGee said.
The BLM would prefer to plant forage kochia when it builds these fire breaks, he added. A low-growing plant native to arid climates, it remains green late in the fire season and competes well by helping block the spread of noxious plants such as cheat grass and Bermuda grass, which represent a major source of fuel for range fires.
Forage kochia has other benefits, said Ted Hoffman, who chaired the resource management plan subgroup as the BLM put the fire break plan together. It's "a great source of protein" for cattle and wildlife and can sustain heavy grazing from domestic animals as well as planet-eating wildlife.
It's also easy to get these plants established in Elmore County's high desert climate, McGee said.
In fact, an area just west of Mountain Home and north of the interstate was seeded with these non-native plants. No major wildfires have burned through the area in recent years, according to Hoffman.
These "green strips" would act as natural firebreaks to limit the size of rangeland wildfires, most of which are caused by lightning, according to Hoffman and other experts that proposed the fire break plan.
Other wild fires, especially those along the I-84 corridor and Highway 20, are often human caused.
However, McGee emphasized that the fire breaks are not meant to stop a wildfire. Instead, they slow the advance of these flames to buy fire crews the time they need to establish defensive perimeters to battle the blaze, he said.
"We have to begin acting now," Hoffman said regarding the need to get the project moving forward. "We need to ultimately be spending money less on fire trucks and more on ways to prevent fires. We need to seed and put in fire breaks so when there is a fire, it doesn't get out of control" and burn hundreds of thousands of acres.
At the same time, work is needed to help restore sagebrush stands.
"All the plants that require a sage steppe ecosystem all depend on sagebrush," he said. "But there's a lot less than there was (largely due to fires) and it may not be there in 20 years.
What is left, Hoffman said, tends to be in concentrated stands and can burn at very high temperatures. In these concentrated stands, those temperatures can actually sterilize the soil, making it difficult for anything to grow there.
If the sagebrush disappears "there won't be much of a chance of growing other grasses again," Hoffman said. The result, he said, could be an ecological catastrophe.